The BBC Music Magazine Interview
The BBC Phil’s new maestro Omer Meir Wellber
On a train between Leipzig and Berlin, Omer Meir Wellber is talking about how, as its new principal conductor, he plans to get to know the BBC Philharmonic. He’s going to enlist the help of Joseph Haydn.
‘He’s starting to be neglected by the big orchestras,’ Wellber suggests. ‘You just don’t hear him enough. But for me he is very important. So each programme will have a Haydn symphony.’ And there’s a good reason. ‘You see who uses the bow correctly. You get to know the musicians. It will be micromanaging. And such fun.’
A conversation with him, I soon discover, has the movement of a Catherine wheel. We talk about Israel, where he was born and is still committed to a charity bringing music across the Palestinian divide; about
why too many orchestras sound the same; about books (he’s finishing a novel); about identity if you’re someone who has long since left home; about Daniel Barenboim, for whom he worked as an assistant in Berlin; about settling down with an orchestra; about Sicily, where he’s taking on the opera house in Palermo.
The previous evening I’ve heard him conduct Mendelssohn in Bach’s church, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where he also performed a version of The Art of the Fugue in which eight contemporary composers used Bach’s notes to produce something original. It was an exhilarating performance, and now he’s on his way to Hamburg, from where he will head back south the next day to conduct opera in Dresden. Such is the life of a conductor plying his trade in the world today.
We stay on the theme of the BBC Philharmonic. Wellber is still only 38 and is surely destined to become a familiar figure on UK platforms. ‘What will be very interesting with the BBC Philharmonic will be if we can find a way to individualise a certain quality, and make it become our quality,’ he says. ‘Because any good
orchestra does have a personality – but nowadays, I’m afraid, less and less. Let’s be honest. The top 50 are all so good now. One may have a better brass section or something, but the standard is so much higher than it once was. And in a way this is unfortunate because it’s more difficult to individualise.’
In Germany, however, where he’s been doing much of his work – while living in Milan – there’s still a character that can’t be replicated elsewhere. ‘Play me the same moment from ten recordings of a Brahms symphony, I’d probably be able to recognise Dresden. It’s the training, the discipline. It’s still there. The tradition is so strong.’
Wellber’s arrival in Manchester has the same quality as his conversation – a whirlwind journey. After conducting the orchestra once, in 2018, he was targeted as the next chief conductor, and although his first seasons will inevitably be less intensive than the rest of the four years ahead (there are other contractual obligations to be honoured) he is evidently looking forward to settling down with a ‘home’ orchestra (while planning Parsifal and the three Mozart/da Ponte operas for Palermo in 2020). ‘I’ve been juggling for maybe ten years and, you know, it is tiring. Physically, I’m fine, but it is musically tiring because so often you’re starting from zero. ‘As a conductor you’re developing all the time but you’re meeting a new orchestra. It’s so important to concentrate for three or four years and start to get to know the players really well. That’s the big goal. I’m incredibly excited, because I think it’s a great orchestra and we’ll do so much broadcasting too.’
Wellber started to play the piano as a five year-old in Israel, where his mother’s family goes back 13 generations and his father’s even more. He attended the conservatory in Be’er Sheva and has established a ‘Strings for Change’ education programme for Palestinaians, in partnership with a Bedouin-jewish education programme called A New
Dawn in the Negev – appropriate for someone who was brought up in a desert community. At the same time, he is frank about political difficulties in his homeland, which he still visits regularly. There is much that he would change. He points out something that many outsiders miss, that the Palestinian question is not discussed as much as it should be. ‘It’s been pushed down the agenda. People in western Europe don’t understand this, but it’s a question that would take me too long to explain profoundly…’
It’s natural that we should talk about the activities of the far right in Germany, where he was made aware of its strength from his work in Dresden, a centre of activity for Pegida, the anti-immigration movement, which demonstrates regularly in the city centre. He tells a story which illustrates a good deal about his personality.
‘I was living in an apartment near the market square, and there’s a Mcdonald’s there,’ he says. ‘Once a month I have to go to Mcdonald’s and this was of those days. I was sitting next to parents with two children and they were very right-wing, with all the accessories. My assistant called me, and I thought: should I speak Hebrew? Let’s see what happens.
‘When I’d finished, the man sitting next to me said immediately – you know, we have nothing against the Jews. That was the first thing he said. Then he spoke about Islam. And he said to me – this is about fear. We are afraid. I said – look,
I’m the conductor here. And I invited them to come to the theatre, to see The
Opening bars
Wellber’s first BBC Phil season
‘I have a lot to introduce that I think will be interesting,’ Omer Meir Wellber told BBC Music Magazine when his appointment with the BBC Philharmonic was announced last October. ‘In Israel, we have a whole generation of immigrant composers, including Paul Ben-haim and Noam Sheriff. When listeners hear them, they will be amazed.’
Wellber gave a glimpse of such treats when he conducted the orchestra in Ben-haim’s First Symphony at the BBC Proms this summer – a season that also saw him wield the baton in Haydn’s
The Creation – but for his opening season in Manchester, he will be treading a largely more familiar path.
That said, his very first public concert as the new chief conductor, on 14 December at Bridgewater Hall, begins with a UK premiere: Sofia Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto, to be followed by Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Beethoven takes centre stage in the next concert, on 7 March, with performances of the Fourth Symphony and Mass in C Major – part of the wider Beethoven 250 anniversary theme. And then, on 30 April, Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel and Schnittke’s Cello Concerto No. 1 will precede the
Sixth Symphony by Shostakovich, the composer with whom Wellber and the BBC Phil first enjoyed each other’s company in March 2018. Marriage of Figaro. They came to the show and I saw them afterwards and they had enjoyed it very much. It is such a mistake in Germany to call these people animals. Really a profound mistake.’ The anger, he says, has to be understood and dealt with.
This touching story leads him into a long reflection about the distance between so many people and what we might call high culture. ‘People believe that something has been taken away from them. It’s not that they have changed – they’ve lost something.’ Musicians, he believes, have to help them get it back. We can’t only blame politics or say that people are stupid.’
Wellber talks passionately about the way that music, particularly in Europe from the 1950s onwards seemed to be abandoning people who lost touch with a culture that they felt was moving away from them. ‘We’re now understanding, I think, the depth of the antagonism towards us.’
This is the conductor as social evangelist. ‘I’m talking basically of six decades or more of creating a wide distance between culture – or whatever we choose to call it – and people’s lives.
The number of people who would never go to a concert or an opera. If someone says “I don’t care about Beethoven, I want to go and hear a nice musical”, that’s fine. It’s a choice. The problem I think is that so many people feel there are different levels in society and that they see us representing an old elite – a white elite – that took something away from them. That’s the point. It’s somehow been taken away.’
Wellber moves easily from reflections on contemporary politics – the tides of protest across Europe clearly disturb him – to his feelings about the obligations of creative artists to connect with the discontent, and not to move away as if it is an unpleasant smell that will soon disappear. And he talks about identity. ‘Everyone has one. You must. It’s your own.’ But his is inevitably complicated. ‘Is Israel a European country or a Mediterranean country, or what?’ He comes to Europe as an outsider, and that part of his identity can’t be made to disappear. It’s as much part of him as the traditions that surrounded him in childhood, and he won’t assimilate a different character just because he has a home in Italy, works across Europe and especially in Germany, and is about to start spending a good deal of time in Manchester.
The novel he has just completed, after eight years, he describes as an alternative history of Israel through the eyes of a man who, at the time of his death, is the oldest man alive, about 109 years old. He has seen it all. And he’ll tell the story of the culture of the second half of the 20th century, that one that we’re stuck with.
As the train approaches Berlin, where I have to hop off, we talk about conducting styles. I mention that I saw a score used by Daniel Oren at Covent Garden where he was conducting Giordano’s Andrea Chenier. It was covered is so many coloured marks and letterings – he’d been using it for decades – that it was surprising he could make anything of it. ‘I’m completely different,’ Wellber says. ‘I never keep a score. I leave it behind. Then when I am going to conduct a piece again I get a new score. That works for me. I trust in the memory of the sound. If there is something there that touched me, it will stay there.
But I’ll also be looking at the music in a new way. Half of it will be in mind, but there will be new thoughts too. This is the process that has to happen.’
Wellber is likely to become an increasingly visible proselytiser for music. Recent performances, in the UK and elsewhere, have attracted glowing praise, but his forceful personality may come to be almost as important with the BBC Philharmonic. He has no interest in buttoned-up diplomatic small talk. He thinks big and wants answers to the questions that nag at him. Where should music go? How is that gap with the ‘lost’ audience to be bridged? He is a warm but impatient individual.
I wish him well in Hamburg as we part company. ‘I’m somewhere between deep gloom and optimism,’ he reflects. ‘But above all, I’m excited.’
‘So many people see us representing an old elite that took something away’